Albany details.

"A Virginia woman was struck and killed while taking flowers to a roadside memorial for her granddaughter..."

"... who died in a crash at the same spot a week ago."

"With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics."

Disillusioned cynics ≈ realistic skeptics. I don't see the problem.

"Una had stretched out on the bed of the guillotine; I lifted the lunette, made her put her head through it, and closed it on her long neck, after carefully lifting her heavy hair."

"She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn't even bother to lower her panties...." Etc. etc. "... Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: 'I'm going to pull the lever, I'm going to let the blade drop.' She begged me: 'Please, fuck my pussy.' - 'No.' I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg."

Ha ha ha. And with that, Jonathan Littell ("The Kindly Ones") has snatched this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Read all the finalists — and laugh (or climax!) — here. Be charitable. It's really very hard to write about sex. Have you ever tried to do it? If you have, I hope you had the sense to laugh at yourself.

ADDED: From the BBC::

Over the years, some of literature's most glittering names have competed for one of its least coveted prizes.

Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, John Updike and Philip Roth are titans among novelists, generally acclaimed for their representations of every kind of human experience - except one.

When writing about sex, says the Literary Review magazine, their standards slip.

Here's the Roth passage that got noticed this year (from "The Humbling"):

He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps...

It was a big year for devices, apparently. Again, I'm cutting the most NSFW parts, which you can click over and read.

... There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement - the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.

It was English that Pegeen spoke when she looked over from where she was, now resting on her back beside Tracy, combing the little black cat-o'-nine-tails through Tracy's long hair, and, with that kid-like smile that showed her two front teeth, said to him softly, 'Your turn. Defile her.'....

Oh, okay. I liked the coyote, though, Phil. That was good. And the "mask on her genitals," that "weird totem mask." That meant something.

IN THE COMMENTS: DADvocate wrote:

I've always wanted to write about nerd sex. Certainly, it would win the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

"After the proper amount of digital manipulation of each others genitalia, I inserted my penis into her vaginal orifice and began rhythmic thrusting motions at a cadence I had calculated to maximize her arousal...." 

At the Duct Tape Café...

... let's try to keep it together.

"Come on, folks, we're being asked to believe that the Secret Service let these people in without going through checkpoints?"

Rush Limbaugh — speaking on the radio right now — does not believe the story of the state dinner gate-crashers. He's suggesting they were, in fact, on the guest list, and the White House later found a reason to want to distance itself from them. He notes that when he's gone to a White House function — he, a very recognizable celebrity — he has had to give his Social Security number and go through multiple checkpoints with the Secret Service. There is something more to this, he wants us to know.

ADDED: Is the Secret Service taking a fall for Obama even as Tiger Woods is (perhaps) taking a fall for Elin Nordegren? That is, perhaps, there is a damaging connection between the gate-crashers and the Obama administration, and the Secret Service is absorbing the blow by taking the blame, when in fact it made no mistake. And Tiger Woods, perhaps, is saying that he's to blame for his accident...

The only person responsible for the accident is me. My wife, Elin, acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble. She was the first person to help me. Any other assertion is absolutely false.

... when it may be that Elin did things that are, in fact, crimes.

"Why Do You Believe What You Do? Do our beliefs form the basis of our partisan and ideological affiliations?"

Here is Josh Marshall asking what, for me, have always been the most interesting questions about politics. I've taken a lot of flak for it too. I've found it really annoys people to take a political or philosophical discussion in this direction. But Josh Marshall isn't really going where I hoped he would with this. He's going where I'd expect Josh Marshall to go, toward showing why Republicans are bad:

There's been a lot of recent evidence not only that Republicans disproportionately disbelieve the evidence for man-made global warming but that their skepticism is growing.

Yeah, but isn't there skepticism growing because there is a whole load of new evidence that the scientists were not being too scientific? Is that "disbeliev[ing] the evidence" or paying attention to evidence?

I think that trend is fairly classed under the general heading of Republican/conservative hostility to science.

Aw, come on now! Why do you, Josh Marshall, believe what you do? Why do you believe that skepticism is hostility to science as opposed to the methodology of science? Why do you believe that the evidence for man-made global warming is real evidence and the evidence of misbehavior by scientists is not real? Is it because you are committed to the policy choices that of your partisan and ideological affiliations?

Marshall makes absolutely no attempt to look into the structure of his own mind. He's a politico using interesting questions not because he's curious about the truth but because he seems to think they work well to attack the people he already wants to attack.

There's more to Marshall's post, and it may get a little better, but it's also vague and meandering. Please read it and let me know if you think I'm being unfair to Marshall, but I think he wanted to take a shot at those bad anti-science Republicans and the rest is vague gesturing at the fact that he went to college and could write a coherent essay on the theme he wanted to take the trouble to do it.

"He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money... Too much Leonard Nimoy... That’s the Chicago Way... He’s a pushover... He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe... President Pelosi... He’s in love with the man in the mirror...."

7 templates.

Why aren't they getting more use?

Mike Huckabee deploys the passive voice.

In a statement about Maurice Clemmons, the man wanted in the shooting of 4 police officers. Boldface added:

He was recommended for and received a commutation of his original sentence from 1990, this commutation made him parole eligible and he was then paroled by the parole board once they determined he met the conditions at that time.

These things just happened to Clemmons, according to Huckabee, who, as Arkansas governor, was the giver of the commutation that Clemmons received.

He was arrested later for parole violation and taken back to prison to serve his full term but prosecutors dropped the charges that would have held him.

Bad prosecutors.

"You know you have a child with autism if ... your child takes more pills than your grandmother."

Oh, ha ha ha. Let's tell jokes about the intensive experiments that parents are performing on their autistic children.

The Tribune found children undergoing daylong infusions of a blood product that carries the risk of kidney failure and anaphylactic shock. Researchers in the field emphatically warn the therapy should not be used to treat autism.

Children are repeatedly encased in pressurized oxygen chambers normally used after scuba diving accidents, at a cost of thousands of dollars. This unproven therapy is meant to reduce inflammation that experts say is little understood and may even be beneficial.

Children undergo rounds of chelation therapy to leach heavy metals from the body, though most toxicologists say the test commonly used to measure the metals is meaningless and the treatment potentially harmful.

Last year, the National Institutes of Health halted a controversial government-funded study of chelation before a single child with autism was treated. Researchers at Cornell University and University of California-Santa Cruz, found that rats without lead poisoning showed signs of cognitive damage after being treated with a chelator....

Many parents who try alternative therapies cite an analogy popularized by a luminary of the movement, a physician who wrote a book on recovering children from autism. They say they feel as if their child has jumped off a pier. Science hasn't proved that throwing a life preserver will save the child, but they have a duty to try, right?...

One Yahoo! group has more than 8,000 members. The treatment takes many forms, including creams for the skin, capsules, suppositories and intravenous infusions of powerful medicines usually used on people with severe metal poisoning.

Criminal.

"In some of the pictures Lincoln's right eye looks half-asleep while the left stares wide-open."

"Cover half the face and each side looks like it belongs to a different person, one appearing downcast and uncertain, the other determined. A person speaking with him would in a sense face two Lincolns, one soft and exhausted, the other fiercely alert."

The radically asymmetrical face of Abraham Lincoln. What does it mean? Does it have something to do with the functioning — presumably high functioning — of the hemispheres of his brain? Generally, we find symmetrical faces beautiful, and this asymmetry may be the key reason we see Lincoln as ugly — though we excuse and even love his ugliness because we feel confident we are looking into the face of a great man. But let's think about asymmetry in faces of other human beings. Perhaps we should make a conscious effort to keep looking at the individuals who initially repel us. Is it Lincolnesque asymmetry? And what complexity and power of the mind lies behind that facial dualism?

And let's think about why — if my hypothesis is true — we feel drawn to the people who lack this complexity and power. It might be that we have evolved to feel comfortable interacting with simple, straightforward people, and our eyes and minds are trained by the long experience of the species to see those qualities in a symmetrical face. That is, our ancestors trusted people who were, in fact, trustworthy, and that is why they survived and produced descendants. The nonancestors of human history did not read faces so well and were betrayed by deceitful, duplicitous, wily people with powerful, complex brains.

Our ancestors were successful in their mistrust of 2-faced individuals. But that doesn't mean that today we should shun the ugly. Not all asymmetrics are dangerous. Some, perhaps, are the very greatest human beings — like Lincoln. Now that we are able to think consciously about what lies beneath the repellent face and now that we live an an ordered society, let's not pass up the opportunity to benefit from the minds that show an asymmetrical face to the world. Don't turn away from the ugly.

"What are you wearing? What do you want to do to me? What do you want me to do to you?"

If there's ever a scandal where your sexting is made public, I seriously hope whatever it is you've written is more creative than that. And if you're going to lie and make up sexting to attribute to somebody else, I hope you're not so lame — it's bad enough to be a liar — that you'd invent generic lines like that. Come on, people — cheaters and liars — raise your game.

An inconceivably bad monument.

We are entering Empire State Plaza, that heinous monument to government waste and stupidity:



Just around that corner is the expensive toilet displayed in the previous post. But continue on a few steps, and you will arrive at something beyond comprehension. This is what the state of New York has in its capital as a memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks:



I hate to shock you over this, but I must insist that you take a few steps back and gaze with horror at the larger view:

Expensive toilet.

An all-too-inviting corner of the atrocity that is Empire State Plaza.

"I don’t want to put you on the spot, but you sure deliver that song like a true believer."

"Well, I am a true believer."

Bob Dylan answers a question that was inspired by his singing of "O Little Town of Bethlehem" on his recently released Christmas album.

Some critics don’t seem to know what to make of this record. Bloomberg news said, “Some of the songs sound ironic. Does he really mean have yourself a Merry Little Christmas?” Is there any ironic content in these songs?

No not at all. Critics like that are on the outside looking in....

"There are surprisingly few hours in the middle of the night, if you get up at say 1am and start working on something."

Said rhhardin, in the comments to the last post, the one about stopping at the welcome center in Pennsylvania.

It's a sound observation, and it got me thinking about insomnia and whether it's worse in the winter when the nights are longer. If you're not going to sleep at all, don't you think it's easier in the summer when the night is over quickly?

Stopping at the Pennsylvania welcome center at the New York end of I-90.

It's eerie late at night...



At the foot of the "Pennsylvania Wineries" column, lies inebriated Santa:



But don't worry....



"You can't make a wrong turn in Pennsylvania."

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian yells: "FROSTY THE SNOWMAN NOT SANTA." Oh, yeah! Good point. Ha ha. I need to get my American iconography straight. 

"If you don't fuck too hard, your painting will be all the spunkier for it."

Advice from Vincent Van Gogh:

"I already told you last spring. Eat well, do your military drill well, don't fuck too hard; if you don't fuck too hard, your painting will be all the spunkier for it."

It's your choice. Do you want spunky paintings or not?

At the Stairwell Café...

... you can get down and dirty.

"I am a local artist, who has created sculptings made up Duct-Tape.. 100% no wires, or fillers."

Dennis Gervasio has "created the illusion of pewter." His opposition to "fillers" may explain his shortening of the term "outsider art" to "outside art" and his penchant for the 2-dot ellipsis.



His sign appears in the window of the Albany café called The Daily Grind — a locale also pictured in  "Man in green sneakers reads Sartre. Dog arrives."

The sculptings look like this, seen from inside the restaurant...



... and this, seen through window static...

"I think it's funny that I, a black man, would never have considered the possible racial implications of that gargoyle."

The Crack Emcee said.

Hell, I wouldn't have even cared - while two white folks are all concerned and ready to point the finger at,...who? What? History? Spare me.

I, too, am joining everyone else in voting for Jimmy Carter - not because I actually saw him, but because I live in the here and now, and not somebody else's past.

Give it a try.

(By the way, Crack has a great blog.)

Are we "still supposed to believe that his wife, Elin Nordegren, somehow turned one of Tiger's Nike SQ drivers into the Jaws of Life"?

"Woods was driving a Cadillac Escalade out of his own driveway, which is the same as driving a tank. He wasn't going fast enough to deploy his air bags. But we're supposed to believe that in a rescue worthy of the new series, 'Trauma,' his wife had to bust a back window to pull her husband to safety after he ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree."

Mike Lupica tells Tiger Woods to get his story out — whatever it is.

AND, from the comments of Fridays's Tiger Woods post: a poem, by David (with "deep apologies" to William Blake):

Tiger, Tiger, that wasn't too bright.
Grabbin' the Caddy and takin' flight.
Perhaps the very lovely Ellin
Some Tiger hanky-pank was smellin'?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what pussy fried thee thy brain?
What the putter? What the wood?
What, her lawyer? Gonna whup you good.

AND: From Inwood follows David with his own "Tiger, Tiger":

TIGER, tiger, not so bright
In the caddy late at night,
What immortal hand or eye
Have framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or drain
Burnt the fire of thy brain
What babe you been A-W-O-L-in?
What you think that do to Ellin?

When Ellin threw your clubs like spears
Did’st water heaven with thy tears?
Did she smile her work to see?
Will she who made this ruin ruin thee?

"OMG, can you believe Obama changed his mind about going to Copenhagen after all this stuff came out? It's like sprinting to board your ship at the last minute, and it's the Titanic."

"You're the Titanic. You are."

Jim Treacher has a dialogue with the global warming evangelist who lives in his head.

"Michaele Salahi (far r.) poses with 'American Idol' judge Randy Jackson (l.), Fergie and other members of the Black Eyed Peas, Micheale's husband Tareq, and, of course, President Obama."

I'm sorry. I want to hate these people. But there's such a silliness to it all. It's so pop culture. And Obama is part of pop culture. It's like that picture I took on the Santa Monica Pier in the summer of '08...


(Enlarge.)

... come to life.

ADDED: "Everyone needs to stop being so mean. Why aren't our White House Party Crashers being toasted? These guys are awesome... for America."

We left Albany at about 1:30 pm (Eastern Time) yesterday, and we pulled into the driveway here in Madison at 2:30 am (Central Time).

Not easy, but we had 2 drivers, and we're both good at napping in the passenger's seat, and it's not fun to stop in a just-off-the-interstate motel around midnight and go through the tedious routine of getting stuff out of the car, checking in, getting a few hours sleep, checking out, getting stuff back in the car, when you could be rolling along and end up in your own bed, with the next morning free to luxuriate in the glorious routine of breakfast and blogging in the Meadhouse dining room. And there are a number of ways to make the driving fun. One that I can show you here is trying to grab photographs from the car window. I'll post a bunch. The compositions are half chosen and half determined by the movement of the car through the American landscape.

1. Kurver Kreme:



2. Babyland:



3. Liberty Income Tax:



4. I-90 sunset:



5. Near Chicago and midnight:

"I like old lady glamour."

Says a 25-year-old guy in an LA Times slideshow about street fashion in Silver Lake.

***

Note: I did some street photography in Silver Lake (back in 2008).

Improvising with the bear.

TJ Miller really wanted the part of Ranger Smith in the Yogi Bear movie. After 2 failed auditions, desperate, he made this video:



He got the part. Actually, I'm a little suspicious. Maybe first he got the part and then this clip was made. A smarter-than-the-average studio effort at viral video... and I'm the carrier.

The proposal to ban new minarets in Switzerland.

BBC reports:

Partial results from the poll which closed at 1100 GMT indicated that the German-speaking canton of Lucerne accepted the ban, while French-speaking cantons Geneva and Vaud voted against....

What is it about minarets specifically?

There are unofficial Muslim prayer rooms, and planning applications for new minarets are almost always refused.

The BBC could be clearer here. Is a Muslim place of worship "unofficial" if it lacks a minaret? Regulation of buildings can be neutral toward religion, and one can imagine a government regulation that happens to exclude the construction of minarets. But this is a case of targeting religion. (A ban like this in the United States would violate both the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.)

Supporters of a ban claim that allowing minarets would represent the growth of an ideology and a legal system - Sharia law - which are incompatible with Swiss democracy.

So it is not only discrimination against religion, it is a restriction of the sort of speech that is most valued in a democracy — criticism of the government. This argument, an attempt to excuse discrimination against religion, makes the ban worse, not better.

But others say...

One hardly needs to hear from the other side. The supporters make the argument against themselves.

... the referendum campaign has incited hatred. On Thursday the Geneva mosque was vandalised for the third time during the campaign....

The president of Zurich's Association of Muslim Organisations, Tamir Hadjipolu, told the BBC that if the ban was implemented, Switzerland's Muslim community would live in fear.

"This will cause major problems because during this campaign in the last two weeks different mosques were attacked, which we never experienced in 40 years in Switzerland.

"So with the campaign... the Islamaphobia has increased very intensively."

Now, this is the situation without the ban, so it's not obvious whether actually having the ban would make things worse or better. If the campaign for the ban is the problem, then Hadjipolu too is critical of free speech. Ironically, both the supporters and the opponents of the ban are afraid of free speech.

ADDED: Swiss feminists lead the fight against minarets, which they portray as "'male power symbols' and reminders of Islam’s oppression of women."

AND: Final results:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

At the Faithful Dog Café....

... you can keep up the conversation while M and I do I-90 miles.

UPDATE: Home, at 3 a.m.  We drove about 980 miles, nearly all on Route 90. We'd turned the heat off for the long weekend, and it was down to 48° indoors. Bracing!

The atrocity that is Empire State Plaza.

You're walking in a neighborhood of 19th century townhouses...



... and you run smack into this:



New York spent $2 billion to demolish 98 acres of 19th century buildings, displacing 9,000 human beings, in order to build a sickeningly ugly collection of government buildings. Is there a worse architectural crime in the history of the world? I'm sure there must be, but...

... it destroyed a neighborhood, isolated downtown from Center Square and created a stark mall that is lightly used and segregated from city life....

Pure evil.



There's whimsy...



... leaden government whimsy.

Look into the sunset...



... and weep.

"I dare you to comb through an entire issue and find a single word between those covers..."

"... that doesn't leave you reeling with delight or nodding vigorously at the gobsmacking truth sparking like a Texas thunder storm just behind it."

The 20 best magazines of the last decade. The quote refers to the magazine in second place.

"Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to."

"Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthysm era all over again. At least, the nightmare is about to end. At least the end of the hell is looming. And this, for the time being, is what does matter."

And can anything erase the immense, unbelievable fatuity of Bernard-Henry Lévy?  Can anything take away the hysteria of this man who has never stopped pouring contempt upon Americans, hounding us through hatred as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthyism — McCarthysm? — era all over again?

Tiger Woods seriously injured after crashing his car into a fire hydrant... and then into a tree.

This happened at 2:25 a.m. as he was pulling out of his own driveway. 

AND: The police say it was not alcohol related.

IN THE COMMENTS: save_the_rustbelt said:

The only thing that would make me leave my house at that time, without alcohol but out of control, would be a raging fight with my wife.

Man in green sneakers reads Sartre. Dog arrives.

The Sartre book was "Nausea"  — great title for reading in a café. And the combination of Sartre and a café got us talking about Sartre's waiter (in "Being and Nothingness"):

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café....

The name of the restaurant was — aptly! — The Daily Grind.

"You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold."

Said William Jennings Bryan in 1896.



He was not talking about that sculpture in the Empire State Plaza in Albany, which I encountered up close.



My point of view:

Human gargoyles of New York.

All a part of the New York Capitol:









We had some discussion about whether the last one is racist and whether there was any significance to the fact that someone once took the trouble to paint the lips red.

"Don't look too closely... or you'll see the swastikas...."

Reading this comment from Scott (in the previous post)...

I haven't been through Albany in years. But I do recall that the NY State Education Building is this gigantic federalist pound cake of a building that takes up the entire block and comes right up to the sidewalks. The scale is just so wrong. It's a frightening building....

... made me want to post the little video I took while walking by that building yesterday. The post title is part of the video dialogue:

Beautiful Albany.

My favorite building in Albany is City Hall, also pictured in the previous post:



In front is a statue of Philip Schuyler, a Revolutionary War general, born in Albany:



Also lovely is the building that houses the New York Court of Appeals (the highest court in the state of New York). The Court of Appeals Hall has a fabulous rotunda:



The mural inside the dome is called "Romance of the Skies." It was painted by Eugene F. Savage:



A very new age vibe. With painted sparkles that remind me of a 5-year-old girl's princess fantasy. Visionary, painted in 1959. What it has to do with law, I'm not too sure. Is law some sort of astrology? But what else to paint in a dome in a government building? You can't depict a God anyone believes in, so why not some Greek/Roman gods?

Near the Court of Appeals Hall, is St. Mary's Church:



Nearby, is Academy Park, which has a cool sculpture of Lewis A. Swyer, who seems to want company:



In the background, you can see the New York State Capitol. All I want to say about that building in this post is that I love the magnificent equestrian statue of the Civil War general Philip Henry Sheridan that guards one side of the Capitol:



I won't go on to the New York State Capitol in this post. An overdone horror, it is only beautiful relative to the unbelievable atrocity that is the Empire State Plaza. It will take separate posts to attend to these complicated architectural matters. This post is called "Beautiful Albany," and I will end it here.

Where we are...

... in America...

Fashion.

No one seemed to notice where we were in the photo in the previous post. It's actually easy to see if you look at all closely. Today, we're somewhere else. Here's a favorite picture from today. It doesn't much reveal where we are, but there are pictures to come that will make it crushingly obvious.

We're giving thanks for everything.

And much love to all the Althouse blog readers, from Althouse + Meade.

A Thanksgiving reflection.

Who made Biden — and Katie Couric — look dumb?

It's not Biden's fault — or Couric's — that he — or she — looks like a doofus posing with reality show wannabes at the White House State Dinner. It's not their job to check identities. It's their job — at a party — to pose like this — or is there some gracious way to deflect posers? You might ask why they're throwing big parties when times are so bad. But what the hell? And when can we watch the big Oprah-Obama TV Christmas special? There's Obama putting up the White House decorations, the doorbell rings, and it's Oprah! The doorbell rings again... and it's — who? — Russell from "Survivor"?

At the Footbridge Nightclub...

... it's your stomping ground.